Mark Twain wrote, “In America, we hurry… what a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!” (Following the Equator, 1897) Thinking and considering a topic takes time. However, we are quick people.” Twain was writing about the quickening of the American attention span 130 years ago. If being in a hurry was true for Twain in the 1890s, we are in a mega-hurry today. In the last two decades, the average human’s attention span decreased from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds. Gen Z’s attention span is a little less than eight seconds!

Average attention span

What does this mean for educators? We either must learn to talk and teach faster or learn how to increase the attention span of the children we teach.

What do we know?

First, we know that educating children does not live in a vacuum; teaching and learning are influenced by our greater culture. A child’s attention span at home and at play is the attention span they bring to school. As we watch children at school when they are not engaged in teaching and learning, they clearly live in micro-moments of conversation and activity. Like honeybees, children flit from one activity to the next, often in no discernible order. If busy is a child’s nature, children are nurtured by a parenting culture that purposefully keeps them busy.

At school, part of their hurry before, during, and after school is caused by a school day that does not give them down time. There is barely enough time for toilet stops and nutrition as we shuffle them on and off buses, from classroom to classroom, and to a lunch break with more time standing in line than eating. Organizationally, we literally chase children through a school day.

Why, then, are we surprised when these same children lose interest in school assignments? Why do we frown when they look up and fidget two minutes into reading three, four, or five pages of material? Why do we feel agitated when constantly repeating to students “now, pay attention, please!”  We know the answers. Too often, schoolwork does not match children’s attention spans, and we do not teach children to extend their abilities to pay attention.

Second, we know that an attention span is a real phenomenon. By definition, attention span is the length of time an individual can concentrate on one specific task or other other item of interest.”

APA definition

Is an attention span important for life and learning? You bet it is. “Attention span is a crucial cognitive function that influences our ability to focus, learn, and accomplish tasks. As we progress through various stages of life, our attention span undergoes significant changes, influenced by diverse factors such as brain development, environmental influences, and individual differences. Understanding these changes can help us optimize our learning and productivity at different ages.”

Attention Span by Age

Third, we know that attention spans change. A person’s attention span naturally develops over time. Infants to age three have rapid-fire attention spans, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes. Their entire environment engages them simultaneously and they do not focus on isolated things for long. Children from birth to age three hear, see, and do many things for the first time and all their world is exciting and stimulating.

Early childhood children grow their attention spans to between five and fifteen minutes in duration. However, they also can be easily distracted. Play-based instruction helps young children to piggyback learning onto their play and use play to learn.

Children in the primary and intermediate ages continue to lengthen their attentions spans. As a generalization, they add five minutes of attention span each year in this age group. By the age of ten, children can focus for up to thirty minutes.

Adolescence is troublesome for children to focus attention. “Raging” hormones, social interactions, and technology can interrupt their focus. On their good days, teenagers typically focus for extended periods of one to several hours. But there are days and times when they cannot.

The demands of schooling contradict what we know about paying attention.

If the speed of a school day is a problem, so are the curricular demands we place on teaching and learning. From the get-go, every grade level and subject area course has more curriculum than can be taught in a school year. After 55 years working with teachers, I am not aware of a single teacher who ran out of assigned curriculum to teach before the last day of school. School curriculum is the proverbial ten pounds of learning in a five-pound bag.

Additionally, we never diminish curriculum; we only add more to it. Everyday and every year adds new history, new science, new literature, and new topics deemed as important for children to learn. Have you ever been to a school board meeting where an agenda item was decreasing what would be taught and learned? Never happens.

It is no wonder that paying attention is so difficult when we do not present an attentional education.

Can we grow a child’s attention span?

Knowing the above, can educators help children to increase the quantity and quality of their attention span so they can learn better in school and in life? Yes, we can.

There are numerous tangentials we can manipulate to increase our students’ span of attention

1. Physical activity. Before requiring children to concentrate, provide them with a stretching or in-place exercise to relieve their need for physical action and make ready for mental activity. Five to 15 minutes of body movement is good preparation for larger amounts of concentration. And insert physical action breaks purposefully between mental activities. Break up learning into chunks and insert physical activity between chunks.
2. Attention exercises. Teach children what “paying attention” looks and acts like. Have children sit or stand appropriately so they physically are prepared to concentrate. Create mental exercises, like jumping jacks for the brain. Give them material to read or problems to solve. Start a timer and instruct them to focus their attention on reading or finding solutions. Stop the timer after a predetermined time and ask children to describe their concentration and what it felt like to concentrate. Repeat by increasing the time.
3. Work within time framed expectations for children of different ages. As a rule of thumb, expect children to concentrate on one task for two to five minutes per their years of age. For example, 10 to 25 minutes for a five-year-old and 12 to 30 minutes for a six-year-old. For practical purposes, start all children at the beginning of their age time frame. Within these frames, identify which five-year-olds can focus for 10 minutes and which can focus for up to 25 minutes. Over time, focus activities to increase all children of the same age towards the upper end of their time frame.
4. Remove visual distractions. For children struggling with their concentration, remove visual clutter. The only thing on a child’ desk or table should be what the item for their focus. As children need other materials and resources, provide them in their order of need. Keep brains focused on the task at hand not looking at stuff not yet needed.
5. Keep classroom walls and spaces quiet. Bright and colorful and detailed posters and signs draw their peripheral vision and then their attention. Older children with stronger attention spans can handle busier environments.
6. Use memory exercises. Integrate card, board, and on-screen games that require children to remember facts, chronology, and variations in details. Children today are gamers so game their brains with knowledge and skill building games. All games, however, should involve competition against the learning outcomes, how much a child can do and how well, not against other children.
7. Have each child rate the challenge of their assignments and keep  track of the rating and where the child begins to lose focus. Children quit engaging in activities they label as hard and too hard. Use their self-ratings to provide each child with an appropriate challenge. As they succeed incrementally, their attention span for sticking with a challenging activity will grow.

https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/7-ways-increase-students-attention-span

Emphasize study to increase attention to study.

The root definition of “student” in verb form means “to study.” A student is a person engaged in study for the purpose of learning. To keep students, busy in school, we assign them an abundance of “doing” tasks and connote the doing of the task with learning. Children do a lot of reading and a lot of math without really knowing how to read for learning or how to learn from the math they do. Decrease the “doing” by increasing the “learning.”

• Read with academic purpose. The trend in school is to have students read sections or abbreviated editions of texts not whole texts or content-rich editions. We think we do this to keep their attention, but the outcome is minimized learning AND minimized attention. At the end of the assignment, they do not know and understand deeply. They achieve less learning because we settle for less in our assignments.
• Teach close reading. Or focused and strategized reading. We know reading is not an innate act for humans. We speak and hear innates, but we read and write only through learning how to read and write. So, teach children to read more intensely. With the right reading tools, their attention to reading and learning from their reading will increase.
• Successive readings. Teach children to read a text assignment three times. Seems like redundancy, but each reading is different. Read first for main ideas and structure. Read second for specific details, vocabulary, and structure of the text. English lit is not biology and biology is not history. Each uses different words and structures for using those words. Read a third time for conclusions – this is what I know now.
• Active reading. Teach children how to underline, highlight, take notes, select the most important sentences in a paragraph and paragraphs in a chapter. Teach them to “mark up” a text on paper or digitally.
• Main points and evidence. Teach them to identify, mark up, and look at the main points of a text assignment. They do this by breaking using reverse essay writing techniques. In the structure of the texts and paragraphs, what are the leading statements and closing statements and what supporting evidence lies between.
• Read whole texts.
• Do not cheat students by assigning only sections for their reading and study. Give them the satisfaction of reading an entire poem or essay or text or novel. This means deeper and more purposeful teaching to support their reading of whole documents. Deeper study and learning does require deeper teaching.

The above only addresses how to read as a part of studying. Teaching for more complete and deeper knowledge, understanding, application, and evaluation of what is being learned applies to all school courses and subjects.

The Big Duh about attention span!

We really do get what we settle for. And children get what we settled for them. Attention span is a product of age and brain development. It also is a product of educational training. Educators have a child’s captive attendance through compulsory education, if not parental needs for childcare. As we have their physical presence, we can maximize their intellectual focus by explicitly teaching each child to be more intellectually attentive, to know and use deeper studying and learning techniques, and to own their personal learning.